Open Farm Puts Carbon Transparency in the Hands of Pet Parents

Open Farm, one of the fastest growing pet food companies in North America, announced the launch of an online carbon experience that will allow pet parents to see the carbon footprint of all Open Farm products and to identify lower carbon emitting products across its portfolio. The carbon footprint launch entitled, ‘Know your Footprint,’ is the first of its kind in the pet industry and furthers Open Farm’s commitment to lowering its carbon footprint and full ingredient transparency.

“What I love about our new site experience is that it helps pet parents identify our lowest carbon products with easy-to-use tools like product badges and collection pages,” said Jacqueline Prehogan, Founder and Chief Brand Officer at Open Farm. “We’re also rolling out new packaging that will allow pet parents to scan a QR code on any Open Farm product to view its carbon footprint in real time. We’re all-in on complete transparency, and that means sharing the emissions data for everything we make.”

With more than 163-million dogs and cats in the United States alone, pets amount for 25-30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption, according to a 2017 journal, ‘Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats’ by Gregory Okin. “The reality is that feeding our pets is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s our responsibility to minimize that impact,” said Prehogan. Open Farm believes that by giving consumers the tools to make informed carbon decisions, pet parents can incorporate reduction of carbon footprint into their decision making when it comes to selecting pet food. “We believe that it’s our job to provide full transparency when it comes to the carbon footprint of our products; pet parents can then feel empowered to make whatever choices feel right for their pets and their families” said Prehogan.

While the Open Farm Know Your Footprint experience is delivering on transparency and enabling pet parents to make informed pet food choices, the Company is also focused on launching low carbon options, like its Kind Earth Plant based kibble which launched in 2021. In addition, in 2020, Open Farm committed to a Science Based Target goal to reduce direct emissions from manufacturing and operations by 42 percent by 2030, while at the same time minimizing the indirect emissions from raw materials. The Company is working to identify opportunities to reduce its overall emissions and has begun making large scale changes to its operations to reduce its footprint across all areas of the business.

Open Farm partnered with an independent third-party consultant to complete a screening-level Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The LCA screening approach was designed to estimate the emissions generated by each of Open Farm’s products by analyzing every stage of the product life cycle taking into consideration ingredient production, product manufacturing, transportation and packaging. This analysis considered greenhouse gas information, including emission factor data (or suitable proxies), for more than 100 ingredients used across 50-plus recipes. All these pieces together create a final carbon footprint, calculated per pound of product that Open Farm has shared on their website blog (Know your Footprint | Open Farm. While all Open Farm products have associated estimate carbon footprint numbers, 17 have been identified as “low carbon options” because they emit less than 1 kg CO2e per pound of product.

Open Farm is committed to continual advancement in carbon transparency to ensure pet parents have as much information as possible to Do Some Good for pets and the planet.